Chris Harris's Blog Archive: January 2011

January was a month I spent
catching up, more than anything else. I spent one weekend in Lytham and
the next in Norfolk, delivering Christmas presents and seeing relatives.
Blogwise, I managed to find plenty to write about, with subjects ranging
from roadworks to bad journalism, and from science fiction to my newly-discovered
talent for making Irish coffee. It's all here.

Mount Shinmoedake (see below) chose a fitting day to erupt, as today
the music world mourned the loss of one of the true greats.

John
Barry, composer of the music for 11 James Bond movies including
You Only Live Twice,
died of a heart attack at the weekend. He composed
music for dozens of films and television series, and each time he did
he transformed them into something special, cool, and memorable. During
his stellar career he
won 5 Oscars and composed some of my favourite pieces of music, particularly
the score for Sidney J. Furie's The
Ipcress File and the theme to the television series
The Persuaders.
Rest in peace, guv'nor.

ENLIGHTENED

The Vikings may have used polarised
light to navigate, according to researchers from Hungary and Sweden.
And you get a house point if you spotted that the Viking standing at the
prow of the ship in the photo accompanying the story was Kirk
Douglas...

ERNST NEEDS A NEW HIDEOUT

Mount Shinmoedake, in southern Japan, has
erupted. As the volcano was the location of Blofeld's secret lair
in You Only Live
Twice I guess he's going to need to relocate...

SCARY

Seen via Boing Boing - the
giant humungous snow pile in Michael Swanwick's back yard isn't just any
humungous snow pile. It's one that lies there, leering at you and glowing
in the dark. That's first-rate material for traumatising small children,
any day of the week. Well done!

A comment on Charlie Stross's website led me today to a veritable gold
mine of Internet strangeness, and once you get past the Geocities-style
front page and the comic sans, it's well worth perusing.You'll find page
after page of fringe science, eccentric inventions and out-and-out nutjob
loopiness from the last century. Swing on over to Rex
Research if you have a moment or two and prepare to be amazed.

AWWW

A robin has discovered that the inside of its local Co-op store in Aberdeen
is not only nice and warm, it also has
breadcrumbs. The visitor is proving to be very popular with both staff
and customers and has even started singing to them.

See, that's the difference between Scotland and England. Down here in
the south west, some jobsworth would have had the poor thing exterminated
as a potential
health risk. Even after seven years I'm still sticking by my vow to
never, ever shop at any Wyevale Garden Centre again.

Roger Ebert's blog is running a letter from Walter
Murch about the current craze for 3D in the cinema and the home. Murch's
verdict is damning: 3D
doesn't work, and it never will. Walter is a Hollywood
legend in not one but two fields (editing
and sound design) and his opinion quite rightly demands a fair bit
of respect. He doesn't beat about the bush, either. In his words, 3D movies
are "dark, stroby, headache inducing, alienating. And expensive."

Even before I read the letter, I must admit I had no interest in buying
a 3D television. However whizzy they may be technically, the combination
of having to wear glasses that don't fix my eyesight and the convergence
issue that Murch discusses (which I already knew about, I'm that geeky)
sounds like a sure-fire recipe for blinding headaches, and that's not
something I want from my home entertainment system.

YOU HAVE ONE NEW MESSAGE

A New Year's Eve suicide bomber in Moscow was blown up before she reached
her target when an unwanted
text message from her phone company detonated the explosives prematurely,
according to Russian security sources.

I went back to my roots at the weekend. I was in Lytham,
delivering Christmas presents to my relatives and catching up with everybody.
I had dinner at my cousin's place on Saturday night, and I had a really
great time. On Saturday afternoon I went for my traditional stroll along
the front, and had a look at the windmill, which was looking very sorry
for itself after the storms of the last couple of months...

DRIVEL

I was reading my aunt's newspaper on Saturday morning and came across
a rewrite of this
story, which talks about the red giant star Betelgeuse in the constellation
of Orion. The article headline promised that in the next few years we
might have "a second sun" shining in the sky, as Betelgeuse
was "about to become a supernova" - oh dear. I chatted to my
aunt about the story, how it had been reported, and how likely it was
to be accurate. My aunt quickly decided it's about time she changed newspapers.

For one thing, when astronomers say stuff like "about to become
a supernova" they mean "in the next couple of hundred thousand
years or so." "Very soon" doesn't mean the same thing to
an astronomer as it does to the average newspaper reader. But the rest
of the story was jaw-dropping, it was so badly written. I couldn't believe
how inaccurate it was. Science reporting in the tabloids has never been
great, but this sank the standards of journalism to a new low. Let's be
clear about this: claiming that we'd see a "second sun" in the
sky is complete drivel. The
facts behind the story are still interesting, but a truthful write-up
isn't going to sell as many adverts in newpapers. So if Betelgeuse did
go kaboom tomorrow, what would we see? Although the supernova would be
bright enough to cast a shadow, it wouldn't be as bright as the full Moon.
Because it's around 600 light years away, it would look something like
Venus does in the evening sky, appearing as a pinpoint of light. It most
emphatically would not float in our skies as a great blazing
disc as bright as the sun.

I was surprised that the original article focused on Betelgeuse, though.
The reason is that it appeared on an Austalian website. Although Orion
is visible from Australia, residents in the southern hemisphere can see
a much more likely supernova candidate in their night sky: the massive
supergiant Eta
Carinae. Eta Car may already be in the process of blowing up: with
even the quickest glance at a Hubble
Telescope image, you know you're looking at a star in trouble. Eta
Car belched out two immense lobes of matter after a cataclysmic outburst
in the middle of the 19th Century, an event so mind-blowingly violent
that some astronomers describe it as a "failed supernova explosion."
Everything about Eta Car is on a different scale. Betelgeuse is some 18
or 19 times more massive than our sun, but it's ballooned out in size
so that its radius is over a thousand times greater than the sun. In contrast,
Eta Car is estimated to have anything up to 150 times the mass of our
nearest star, but it's packed into a space that's about a tenth of the
radius of Betelgeuse. When that sucker goes bang, it's really
going to go bang. It's just as well it's around 7500 light years away.

But the most important point is, we don't know when that will be. We
can't predict when supernovae occur - that's part of the reason that they're
so exciting when they do happen. Betelgeuse or Eta Carinae might explode
tomorrow, but on the other hand they might not go boom for tens, or hundreds
of thousands of years. Claiming that it's imminent so you can tie it in
to some dire piece of hokum involving the Mayan calendar is just lazy
journalism.

But, hey, it sells newspapers, so it must be okay, right?

THE POOR DEARS

I owe my continued well-being to science. When I was a kid, I had something
seriously wrong with my kidneys and without a corrective operation I would
have spent most of my life in wretched agony with kidney stones. The massive
leaps forward that medicine took during the 20th century were all down
to people who wanted to know how things really work. They were based on
experiment and observation: in biology, where an understanding of the
function of the kidneys and basic anatomy allowed my doctor to diagnose
what was wrong, and where the development of surgical techniques enabled
the surgeon to fix the problem; in chemistry, where the investigation
of the properties of molecules produced anaesthetics and antibiotics that
enabled me to survive without being traumatised or succumbing to infection.
That being the case, I tend to be very supportive of the scientific method,
and the rise in anti-scientific media coverage over the last decade or
so really pisses me off. Read Bad
Science, Ben Goldacre's excellent book on current media attitudes
to science and you'll feel like slapping someone. That's why I blog about
stories like the one above. It's not a lot, but it feels like I'm doing
something to fight the rise of stupid.

Professor Brian Cox does great work to promote science on television
and radio. I thoroughly enjoyed his Wonders
of the Solar System series for the BBC and I can recommend getting
it on blu-ray as it looks fantastic in high definition. I can't wait to
see the new series he's just finished filming, Wonders
of the Universe. He is very active on
Twitter too, and if you've followed him for any length of time you'll
know he has no time for folk who believe in Mayan calendar prophecies,
horoscopes, homeopathy, or other aspects of what he categorises as "woo-woo."
People who tend to ignore rational scientific evidence and tell him about
their varied and imaginitive (but completely irrational) world views are
roundly chastised as "nobs" (Prof Cox is from Oldham, and us
Lancashire folk don't believe in mincing words.)

When the Professor appeared on the BBC's Stargazing
Live shows a couple of weeks ago, he and Dara O'Briain took great
pains to distinguish what the programme was about - astronomy - from astrology,
or fortune telling, which falls slap bang in the middle of prime woo-woo
territory. Carl Sagan once pointed out that the gravitational effects
of the planets when you are born are around the same
order of magnitude as the gravitational effects of the midwife. And
these days, computers and the Internet make it easy to do a statistical
analysis of words appearing in 22,000 horoscopes
and discover that, oops, they're
amazingly non-specific. Gosh, you'd almost think they were written
to be totally interchangeable, regardless of what star sign they're for!

Astrologers turn out to be a touchy lot, it seems. They're feeling particularly
sensitive at the moment after Professor Parke Kunkle's story about changing
star signs convinced thousands of people that they'd been reading
the wrong horoscope - which, if you think about it, says a lot about the
perceived accuracy of the things, doesn't it? The reports (and a lot of
the subsequent coverage on the web) show that astrologers really don't
like it if people show them up like this, particularly when people start
pointing and laughing. But when you can't prove that what you do is anything
other than hand-waving that confuses correlation with causation, what
you gonna do? Perform experiments in a controlled environment and make
measurable predictions on the outcome beforehand, based on the model you
have of the process that's involved? Compile evidence to refute the counter
claim and publish it in a peer-reviewed scientific journal? Er, no. But
the poor dears have managed to set up a petition, apparently. They feel
they're being hard done by, and they want Professor Cox and Mr O'Briain
to stop picking on them. A fortune-teller complains about his trade's
treatment in the BBC story about the zodiac, too: "The publicising
of the effect - and its use to dismiss astrology - represents the "incredible
bigotry some members of the scientific community display towards astrology."
To which I say: a petition isn't going to change anything, folks. If you
want the approval of the scientific community, you've got to behave like
scientists. And if you can't do that, then prepare to be mocked.

Because that's exactly what you deserve.

AND NOW...

I'm off to the kitchen, as there's a haggis in there with my name on
it. If you're knocking back a wee dram or two to celebrate
Burns
Night tonight, have a great time.

I'm feeling grumpy today, so I apologise in advance for the tone of the
blog. It might have something to do with the fact that I've discovered
that from tomorrow, there are going to be more roadworks in the village.
There's a sign by the crossroads at the top of the hill telling me I can
expect long delays for the next 22 weeks while they turn the junction
into a aroundabout. Oh, deep joy.

Recent "improvements" to the traffic flow in South Gloucestershire
have had a variable track record. The traffic lights at Junction 14 on
the M5 have to be turned off during peak traffic times in the morning
because when they were first switched on they caused tailbacks several
miles long. On the other hand, when I arrive at the junction in the early
hours of the morning I can sit for several minutes waiting for the lights
to change, even when there's nothing else on the roads.

The reason the roundabout is being built is to support increased operations
at the local quarry. But traffic from the quarry, which currently has
priority over traffic from the village heading for the M5 junction, will
now have to give way. That's quite a big change to the traffic flow, so
I guess we'll only find out if it works when everything's completed. By
then, of course, it'll be too late to do anything about it if it doesn't.

ON BRAND

Thanks to Leon for posting a link earlier in the week to Things
Real People Don't Say About Advertising. Just after I visited the
site, one of my colleagues sent me a link to the discussion of a new
brand of lager, and the copy accompanying the pretty pictures rapidly
brought that tumblr link to mind: "This juxtaposition forces
you to think about the brand and becomes part of the beer drinkers
dialogue."

Er, no. No. it doesn't.

And not just because the idiots who wrote it can't even use an apostrophe.
The design might get an initial chuckle out of people; it's an Australian
lager, the label's upside down, geddit? But the joke will wear out rapidly
enough. In fact, dressing it up in the language of advertising does a
very good job of killing it off at birth. As a result, I got considerably
more laughs out of the pompous justification for the design than I did
out of the design itself.

When marketing professionals start uttering ludicrous phrases like that
one, I start wondering about good their grasp of reality is before realising
that they don't actually believe what they're saying - it's an
aspirational statement (and tellingly, "aspirational"
is such a popular marketing term, isn't it?) What they're saying relates
to how things would be in the world if marketing was the most important
job that anyone could do, ever. It's wishful thinking on the part of people
who believe they ought to be paid extraordinary sums of money for what
they do, but have no empirical evidence available to justify their existence.
So instead, they issue pronouncements like this which reflect things as
they ought to be rather than as they are - it doesn't
matter if the chances of these things actually coming to pass are infinitesimally
small. Just saying it could really make it happen, as far as they're concerned.

Politicians do the same thing. It doesn't matter what the rest of the
world thinks, or what the reality of a situation might be; so long as
you can come up with some way of describing things that sounds more-or-less
positive, and repeat it often enough, it's amazing how many people will
just nod and accept what you've said as the truth.

For some reason this evening I decided I was going to have a go at making
Irish coffee. Booze and caffeine - two of my favourite food groups! I
ended up making a Scotch coffee as I didn't have any whiskey in the house,
only whisky, but you get the general idea. I used the instructions at
Mahalo and they worked pretty well. I've never tried making the stuff
before, but by my second glass I'd decided I was rather good at it...

In the interests of research I'm just having a third one to check that
there aren't any problems with consistency. Things are looking pretty
good so far.

"You know? Get some r 'n' r?" Neo's friend
Choi was probably
right. More evidence (as if I needed it) that I need to cut
down on the amount of time I spend trawling the Internet comes from researchers
at Stanford University, who have identified a condition known as separation
anxiety in heavy users. Of course, I'm nowhere near as easily distrac-

DOES WHAT IT SAYS ON THE TIN

In
praise of the sci-fi corridor from the folk at DenOfGeek.com. I'd
never really thought about how much action in SF movies takes place in
corridors, but it turns out to be a lot. You only have to watch a few
episodes of just about any flavour of Star Trek to realise how pervasive
the corrodor can be...

NSFW, BUT I LIKE IT

Thanks to Phil for this one - a
sign language student's final project: signing to Cee-Lo Green's last
single, F*** You.

Pure joy, and a delight to watch.

WHILE IT LASTS

You might want to consider making the most of Internet services like
Skype or Facebook while they still exist in a usable form, because according
to Evgeny Morozov the Internet is not
going to be around in its current shape for that much longer. Maybe
that'll reduce the likelihood of us all coming down with separation anxiety,
then.

I've spent quite a lot of this weekend doing one or the other; this morning
I finished reading Richard
Morgan's science fiction novel Broken
Angels and went straight on to start the sequel, Woken
Furies. I read the first Takeshi Kovacs novel, Altered
Carbon, a couple of years ago and really enjoyed it. Set in a bewildering
future where dying is, on the whole, a temporary inconvenience rather
than the major setback it is at the moment, Altered Carbon was Morgan's
first novel. It won the Philip
K Dick award in 2003 (and you may recall that back in 1984 a certain
William Gibson won the same award for his first novel, Neuromancer).

Broken Angels was a satisfying sequel, full of alien technology and corporate
double dealing. I'm hoping Woken Furies will deliver as well. I'm only
a few chapters in, but so far the writing feels looser, more relaxed;
while the descriptions of outrageous weapons technology are still in evidence,
they don't feel quite as - I dunno, fetishistic as the first
two novels. One thing that is beginning to really annoy me about his writing
is the punctuation. The books really need an attentive pass over by a
decent editor. People (and things with interesting names like scorpion
guns) will ask a question that does not end in a question mark; sentences
often have a full stop in the middle, which makes. It difficult to make
sense without rereading things, and it's beginning to grate a bit.

I've been doing some writing of my own, too. As promised, my review of
TRON: Legacy is now up, as is a review of
the Blu-Ray release of Inception that I
got before Christmas. Enjoy.

To Ruth, who has had a paper she co-authored accepted for publication,
and to Rob, whose discovery
in the Alps last year has now been officially announced. I'm very
proud of both of you!

WHILE I REMEMBER

I was talking to the twins about the bizarre Craig
Ferguson song about Dr Who that was kicking around on the net before
Christmas. They hadn't seen it, so here
it is.

However...

When an industry immerses itself in unnecessary jargon, it's usually
a sign of insecurity. The entertainment industry in particular deploys
some of the most wilfully obtuse and, frankly, embarrassing verbiage you're
ever likely to encounter (just read the Variety website for more than
a couple of minutes and I guarantee you'll feel like slapping the writers.)
Even so, reading about this video footage last month made my heart heavy
and filled me with despair. Why? Because of everyone's insistence on describing
that little clip on YouTube as a "cold open", that's why.

Sorry, but not only is "cold open" one of the most ludicrous
terms I've ever heard, it reeks of so much pretentiousness that whoever
came up with it ought to be boxed sharply about the ears and sent to English
classes for a couple of years.

THE TWANG'S THE THANG

A couple of friends have been posting pictures of their guitars and
basses on Facebook recently, and they were all rather cool. But then things
deteriorated and sent us looking for pictures of luthiery's less aesthetically
pleasing creations, and I ended up finding this.
And that's when I knew I had to stop.

THAT WAS THE YEAR THAT WAS

Dave
Barry's humour hasn't really made it across to this side of the pond
as much as it should have done, but his review
of the past year made me laugh. Here are a couple of highlights that
had people in the office wondering what I was snorting at:

May - On the terror front, New York City police, alerted by Times Square
street vendors, discover a smoking SUV packed with explosives —
a violation of many city ordinances, including the ban on smoking. Fortunately,
the car bomb is disarmed, and a suspect is later captured at Kennedy
Airport by sharp-eyed TSA officers trained to spot suspicious behavior.
Ha ha! Just kidding, of course. The suspect is captured by U.S. Customs
agents at the last minute after boarding a Dubai-bound plane filled
with passengers who, like the suspect, had all been carefully screened
by the TSA to make sure they were not carrying more than three ounces
of shampoo.

June - Apple finally releases the long-awaited iPhone 4, which incorporates
many subtle improvements, the cumulative result of which is that it
can neither make nor receive telephone calls. It is, of course, a huge
hit.

I have made a resolution to read more of his stuff this year. I'm obviously
going to enjoy it.

WHEREFORE ART THOU?

I went to see TRON:
Legacy last night. I'm still mulling over my review, which will end
up on my films page in due course, but one of the trailers I saw was for
a bizarre animated Disney film coming out next month called
Gnomeo
and Juliet. Despite the film being a Disney production, it felt more
like an Aardman film. The whole thing has a profoundly British ambience
and the cast list is extraordinary: the title roles are played by James
MacEvoy and Emily Blunt and the supporting cast includes Michael Caine,
Patrick Stewart, Maggie Smith, Julie Walters, Richard Wilson, Jason Statham,
Hulk Hogan, Dolly Parton and Ozzy Osbourne.

Just imagine ending up in the same room as that combination of people.
Just imagine it.

Christmas is over for another year, the tree has been taken down and
the decorations are back in the loft. Today is my last day of freedom
before I head back to work and I'm spending it inside, as it's been pouring
with rain for most of the day. At two o'clock in the afternoon it's so
dark and gloomy that I've lit a couple of candles to brighten the place
up a bit.

It's been a very different break for me this year as I've spent most
of it at home; I'd usually drive the best part of a thousand miles over
Christmas, but this year the furthest I've driven in the last two weeks
has been to the local supermarket. It's been quiet and relaxing, although
I don't really feel rested because I'm really out of shape at the moment.
This year I really need to improve my fitness levels. I won't be going
out for a walk today, though. I'm going to wait until it's a bit nicer
out there.

NOT SO GOOD

Yesterday brought news of the passing of singer songwriter Gerry
Rafferty, Forbidden
Planet's Anne
Francis and bass legend Mick
Karn. News that the former bassist with Japan
had died came as quite a shock; at 52 he was only a couple of years older
than I am. He had a unique sound; check out Japan's Visions
of China for an example that still sounds amazing a couple of decades
on. He was a huge influence on my bass playing, and one of the main reasons
I started playing fretless in the first place. He'll be greatly missed.

Have you noticed how many people on TV have been hailing 2011 as "the
start of a new decade"? I'd lay money on the fact that eleven years
ago a lot of them were hailing 2000 as "the start of a new millennium."
I wish people would make up their minds...

A GOOD START

You know how I said last month that I wanted to focus on being more creative
this year? Well, you can hear the first results of that resolution
here.
It's another musical collaboration between members of the
William
Gibson Board - and particular thanks should go to Mel for providing
the vocals! I want to get back in to songwriting this year - if I can
manage one new track a week, I'll be very pleased with myself. I am also
planning on doing justice to FAWM this
year. Maybe the third time's the charm; if I manage 14 songs in 28 days
I'll be well ahead of my target for the year.

I've also been back in the kitchen, and there's a fresh batch of home
made curry bubbling away on the hob as I write this. I haven't really
cooked proper food for months, as it's been far too easy to chuck a ready
meal in the microwave or the oven. I'd forgotten how satisfying it is
to make something for myself. It smells really good, too.

(APPLAUDS)

Just in case you didn't catch Jools Holland's show on New Year's Eve,
you'll
want to watch this. It's The Dambusters March, played on toy cats.

Yes, you read that correctly.

Toy cats.

It comes in for a lot of stick, but British television really is the best
in the world, you know.